Change the AirDrop “Pop” Sound Effect

AirDrop is a great local peer-to-peer file sharing feature in Mac OS X Lion that is surprisingly useful. That said, the ‘pop’ or drop sound effect that you hear when someone AirDrops you a file has always annoyed me because it’s the same sound effect you hear when you get a new iChat message. Like many other things in OS X Lion, it’s easy to customize with some minor tweaking.

Before changing the sound effect you’ll need to get a new sound to replace it, so find a sound you want to use, but:

Export the sound effect and name it “Invitation.aiff” and place it somewhere like the OS X Desktop for easy access.

The shorter the sound effect, the better

A short sound is recommended because you don’t want an entire song playing when someone AirDrops you a file, but it will if you don’t shorten a long audio file.

Once you have saved your new audio file:

Hit Command+Shift+G to bring up the “Go To Folder” window and enter the following path:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/

Locate the file named “Invitation.aiff” and rename it to “Invitation-backup.aiff” – you will need to authenticate the name change, this allows you to revert the change back to the default AirDrop sound

Drag and drop your own version of “Invitation.aiff” into the open /Resources/ folder, you will need to authenticate again

Now open the Terminal from /Applications/Utilities/ and type:

killall Finder

Have someone AirDrop you a new file and enjoy your new AirDrop sound effect

Anytime you want the default sound back, just delete your own Invitation.aiff and rename Invitation-backup.aiff back to Invitation.aiff, kill the Finder, and you’ll hear that familiar iChat pop sound again.